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Leslie Beaulieu is a Massachusetts resident who has come to Vermont on weekends to work on her family home. She’s aware of the rumors that out-of-staters are coming in “droves.” And she wants you to know: She comes here responsibly.
“When I come, I isolate to my own home,” she said via email. “I have not gone to one store or public place. I bring every single thing I need to make this possible.”
But she understands the fear Vermonters feel — she’s had it, too. She lives in a seaside town which she said is full of people from everywhere imaginable.
“I wish those people would stay home, so I could enjoy my own town,” she said. “I get it.”
Since Gov. Phil Scott issued a 14-day quarantine order to out-of-staters coming into the state in March, concerns about out-of-staters bringing the virus to Vermont have abounded on social media, neighborhood conversations and VTDigger’s reader emails.
Many have pushed the government to release more details about how many out-of-staters have tested positive for the virus. At the moment, Vermont assigns all out-of-staters a designated county of residence for reporting their case, making it difficult to distinguish their numbers.
VTDigger reached out to the Vermont Department of Health separately to find out the total number of out-of-staters that have tested positive for the virus, and we received an answer: 81 people, or about 7% of cases, as of May 17.
It is hard to discern whether that number is a danger, or part of the daily reality of Vermont life. Out-of-staters form a core part of the state’s homeowners, tourists and workers.
But we do know that Vermont’s surrounding states — the sources of many of our visitors — are struggling to contain their Covid-19 outbreaks. At a recent press conference, Department of Financial Regulation Commissioner Michael Pieciak said 41% of all U.S. active cases so far in the Covid-19 pandemic have been within a five-hour drive of Vermont, raising concerns about its ability to truly limit viral spread.
“We need to watch our neighbors closely,” said Pieciak. “We are not an island.”
Gov. Phil Scott says he’s instructed his team to take an in-depth look at Vermont’s neighbors’ statistics.
“I know how incredibly important it is to our tourism and hospitality sectors, and to protect the jobs they provide,” Scott said. “Because if we do this right, and view this as a marathon, not a sprint, we will win this race.”
Have out-of-staters been spreading Covid-19 in Vermont?
The definition of “out-of-stater” is vague and often varies from person to person. Many people picture the typical tourist or second home owner, but out-of-staters can also include students, traveling nurses, seasonal workers and people who have recently made a permanent move to Vermont.
The Census only releases some data on the first category: About 16% of homes in Vermont are vacant except for seasonal or recreational use. But that doesn’t tell us how many of those are occupied in a typical March or April, said Emily Beam, an economist at the University of Vermont.
“Big surveys like the Census … aren’t set up to pick up temporary residences,” Beam wrote in an email.
There aren’t any public datasets for the other categories at all, Beam wrote.
“I would expect that post-closures, most ‘out-of-staters’ would be seasonal residents, unless they found a way to rent a house or stay with friends [and] family,” she said. “However, that’s still an assumption.”
So it’s hard to say whether the 7% of Covid-19 cases attributed to out-of-state residents form a disproportionate number of cases relative to their population.
The Department of Health did not respond to requests to break down the data over time, to see whether most cases occurred early in the pandemic, during its peak, or now as the state reopens.
That makes it impossible to tell whether the majority of cases are people who were living here as the pandemic began, or people coming here as the state loosens its restrictions on businesses and outdoor spaces.
What’s more, the percentage of out-of-state cases might be skewed. The state has encouraged out-of-staters to get tested when coming or returning to Vermont, meaning that they might form a higher percentage of tests than their population — and therefore a higher percentage of cases.
State officials have said in the past that out-of-staters are tracked in Vermont, because they’re included in the total case numbers for the state.
They have also expressed concern about out-of-staters facing hostility and stigma. There is at least one instance of a family being stopped and harassed for having out-of-state license plates — even though they’d been living in the state for months.
“I don’t want to turn it into an ‘us versus them’ situation,” Scott said. “We see that in other states, we’re better than that.”
Surrounding states see high rate of cases
That doesn’t mean there’s no reason to worry about cases coming in. It’s likely Vermont got its first cases from its surrounding states, according to an analysis by the state of the initial spread.
Vermont official’s heatmap of the spread of Covid-19 in the region suggests that an outbreak began in New York City and Boston, then slowly spread to rural areas like New Hampshire, northern New York and Vermont.
Now, data shows that Vermont has been an island of recovery, as its surrounding states curb their pandemic — but aren’t able to vanquish it.
“First you notice how few cases Vermont has experienced again relative to our neighbors, and then second, you also notice the marked improvement,” Pieciak said.
Those neighbors have a history of travel to Vermont, too. Tourism data shows that Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut form the biggest percentage of Vermont’s tourists.
It’s not only New York City and Boston that have lingering case numbers. Several of the counties surrounding Vermont have higher numbers per capita than their Vermont neighbors, particularly on the New York-southern Vermont border.
The modeling presentation from the state showed that many hotspots of Covid-19 cases were within a few hours’ driving distance of the Vermont Statehouse, including one in Montreal.
That doesn’t just mean worrying about out-of-staters; Vermonters could visit those places and bring back the virus, too. While Vermonters had a large drop in social mobility in March and April, their movements have begun to rise again as the state reopens and warm weather hits.
“In fact, you can actually see this week that Vermonters are now more mobile than their counterparts in New Hampshire, generally we’ve been less mobile than both New Hampshire and Maine so this is a new and recent development,” Pieciak said.
The Vermont Agency of Transportation has been tracking both border crossings of both Vermonters and non-Vermonters since April 1. Their data shows that border crossings have been steadily rising since that time period, going from about 7,000 cars coming in per day to about 14,000. Out-of-state license plates formed a little less than half of those border crossings, according to its Covid-19 dashboard.
But despite the rise, AOT spokesperson Amy Tatko said border traffic was roughly at 60% of what it normally is this time of year. At the height of the pandemic, it was 50% of normal, she said via email.
Gov. Scott said Memorial Day weekend did see a rise in border crossings — 60,000 people came in or left Vermont, compared to 50,000 the previous week. But he said that difference wasn’t large enough to draw worrying conclusions. “It wasn’t dramatic, but there was an increased number of people coming into the state,” he said.
Scott has repeatedly said he hopes to reopen more of the tourism, lodging and leisure sector — but “we have to do it safely.”
“We don’t want to make a mistake,” he said. “We don’t want to go back about three steps and have to put measures in place that are further restrictive.”
Asked about what it would take to further lift restrictions on out-of-staters, Scott said he would look for the state’s numbers to “start looking like Vermont.”
“We’ll do this in a methodical way,” he said. “This is a priority for us. We’re working on it, and we hope to do it, just as quick as we possibly can.”
